Journey to an Overlooked Past

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

MICHAEL KORIE, a lyricist, has nothing against the plaque in Greenwich Village marking the site of the former Stonewall Inn. At that spot, on Christopher Street, gay men battled police in June 1969 and began the modern movement for lesbian and gay rights.

But when Mr. Korie walks the streets of New York, he sees many other places where gay New Yorkers gathered in the decades before the now-legendary Stonewall rebellion. There is no plaque on Columbus Circle to commemorate a Childs Restaurant where gay men created a ''cafeteria society'' in the 1920's and 30's. No engraved words mark the Bowery's turn-of-the-20th-century ''fairy resorts,'' the nightclubs where rouged men mingled with brawny laborers and uptown swells. And how many tours to Harlem point out the site where men in sequined splendor competed for prizes at an annual drag ball that drew thousands from the early 1920's into the late 30's?

In fact, few New Yorkers realize such places ever existed.

''There's a lot of mythology about the contemporary gay rights movement,'' said Mr. Korie, a slim, professorial-looking 45-year-old whose credits include the libretto for the 1995 opera ''Harvey Milk,'' a work based on the life of San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor. ''That it began with Stonewall, that gay people were in the closet until then. There have been books and articles about gay life before Stonewall. Nevertheless, that mythology persists.''

Tomorrow night at 7:30 in Carnegie Hall, a new choral work with lyrics by Mr. Korie and music by Larry Grossman will try to do what the history books could not. The New York City Gay Men's Chorus will offer the premiere of ''A Gay Century Songbook,'' a collection of songs that traces the evolution of lesbian and gay culture in New York during the first half of the 20th century. The hourlong piece, which will include a narrative read by the actor Joel Grey, explores how earlier generations of New Yorkers transformed restaurants, parks and streets from Harlem to Brooklyn into places for themselves, despite deep-seated prejudice and legal prosecution.

The song collection is intensely site-specific. ''It is so related to New York and has kind of a New York attitude,'' Mr. Korie said. ''I don't know if it will play in Dallas,'' he added. ''I can't see them singing about Dora on the Bowery.''

Songwriters have mapped New York for the world beyond its borders, saying the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, that the lights are always bright on Broadway. This work is a Baedeker to a less-well-known city.

Some of these places survive, but many were demolished decades ago. They were urban ephemera, unremarkable parts of the street vernacular, or situated in vice-ridden areas that have since been sanitized, thanks to economic upturns and civic improvements. But they made an indelible mark, said Mr. Korie. Learning where others met for nickel coffees or bootleg gin, he said, gave him a sense of his ''own gay roots.''

''Gays made such an impact on history that continues to linger in New York's buildings and its spirit,'' said Mr. Korie, who wrote for The Village Voice and edited a weekly, now defunct, called New York Guide before turning to songwriting in the 70's. His songbook follows a fictional Irish immigrant named Macklin Moran, from his arrival in New York in 1900 until 1948, the year the Kinsey report told Americans that gay men were more common than most people thought.

Seen through Moran's eyes, the Hudson piers of 1900 are where gay veterans of the Spanish-American War sing of their plans to abandon their hometowns and find lodgings in rooming houses. Gramercy Park in 1910 is the setting for lesbian ''marriages,'' like the one between the novelist Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. By 1915, gay-only refuges had emerged in the form of Turkish baths, including the Everard Baths on 28th Street near Sixth Avenue and the Ariston Bathhouse at 55th and Broadway.

Mr. Korie's lyrics are laced with the argot and codes of an earlier subculture, in which gay co-workers found one another by discussing the Ziegfeld Follies on breaks; lesbians endured tweed suits till May; and a red tie worn on Riverside Drive was a sexual semaphore. Many tunes are joyous, reflecting what Mr. Korie calls ''windows of tolerance'' during which antihomosexuality laws were sporadically enforced. Before the 1930's, the point at which political change led to a sharp escalation in arrests, a bemused or indifferent public allowed visible lesbian and gay enclaves to develop in Greenwich Village, Times Square and Harlem.

But there are also musical reminders of the clouds that hung over the same-sex dance partners in the ballroom of the Hotel Astor near Times Square, the campy kaffeeklatsches at the Horn & Hardart Automat near Bryant Park, and the winter encampments of gay hobos on the Lower East Side. At the prompting of antivice groups, the police occasionally raided even cafeterias.

Still, Mr. Korie said, the point of the songbook is that even in the New York of a century ago, ''gay people had an existence that wasn't reflective of fear. They weren't all routinely arrested.''

When the Bowery Was In Flower, Resplendently Gay

Certainly the phrase ''only in New York'' could find no greater relevance than in the Bowery of 1905. One recent morning, Mr. Korie took a visitor to Cooper Square in Lower Manhattan -- home to Cooper Union and the offices of The Village Voice -- a place where gay life flourished at the turn of the 20th century.

An auto parts store that faces a strip of well-groomed commercial buildings is a reminder of the days before the most recent wave of gentrification. But nothing remains to suggest the time when the Third Avenue El rattled over bars, dance halls and other pleasure palaces for workingmen. These included ''fairy resorts,'' nightspots whose attraction was the presence of effeminate men. Known among themselves and to others as ''fairies,'' these entertainers tweezed, powdered and perfumed themselves, fashioning their hair into stylish marcelled waves. Women's apparel -- low-cut dresses and high boots -- sometimes completed the look, although strict laws against cross-dressing made full drag a rarity.

For profit, or sometimes just pleasure, these men sang and danced with each other and with male patrons, offering sex in rooms behind the bar. At their zenith in the 1890's, at least half a dozen such establishments lined the Bowery, and an equal number could be found in the area known as the Tenderloin, along Sixth Avenue and Broadway between 23rd and 40th Streets.

Crowds of society folk, both men and women, came from all over New York to gawk. ''The whole idea of slumming originated not in Harlem but here,'' said Mr. Korie, ''because it was chic to come down here and see the fairies dance.''

He lingered in front of 32 Cooper Square, a six-story Georgian-style brick building that now houses several film companies. No. 32 was the site of Columbia Hall, one of the most notorious fairy resorts and one that earned the nickname Paresis Hall, after a medical term for a disease caused by late-stage syphilis.

Mr. Korie's bouncy song ''That Way'' is set in Paresis Hall. It is a catalog song, containing a seemingly endless list of humorous topical references about Alice B. Toklas, the Ziegfeld Follies' men's lounge and a strip of Coney Island beach along which gay men sometimes paraded in dresses and hats fashioned from beach towels.

''The Committee of 14 would lead 'fleshpot tours' to Paresis Hall and tell people how bad it was,'' Mr. Korie said, referring to a moral-purity society of the era. Tongue-clucking, he added, was probably accompanied by sexual titillation.

Just a Bar With Patrons Named Truman, Tennessee and Rudolf

The Bowery was also temporary home to the gay hobos who wintered in the cheap lodgings during an era in which crowds of transient workers moved in and out of New York by rail. Older and younger men often paired off in couples of ''wolves'' and ''lambs'' The older man helped the younger one find shelter in a Skid Row hotel, and the younger one performed ''wifely'' domestic duties. Mr. Korie recalls this world in the moody and wistful song ''Nothin' Is as Open as the Road.''

Whither goes the railway track,

South with Johnny or north with Jack,

Nothin' owned is nothin' owed,

And nothin' is as open as the road

Mr. Korie's next stop was Julius', a bar at Waverly Place and 10th Street. It is not far from the site of the Stonewall Inn and in some eyes nearly as legendary; it played itself in the 1970 film ''The Boys in the Band.'' In the 60's, it was the site of a challenge to state laws forbidding gay bars from obtaining liquor licenses.

''It's well known that Julius' is the oldest gay bar in the city,'' said Mr. Korie, who learned of the place when he was growing up in Teaneck, N.J. Soon after moving to New York in 1974, he made a pilgrimage to the famed saloon.

The bar dates from 1864, said Tracy O'Neill, the current bartender. Ray Silvano, 74, who was having an early drink, recalled stopping by as a child in the 1930's to plunder the cracker bowls. With its spartan decor, wagon wheel fixtures and chalkboard notices detailing practice schedules for the Barbarians, the bar's softball team, Julius' looks more sports bar than shrine.

But one wall of this nontrendy neighborhood gay bar is plastered with newspaper clippings recalling its days as a gay speakeasy, a favorite of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Rudolf Nureyev. Another wall is a gallery of yellowed celebrity photographs with faded signatures. The hardwood bar is carved deep with generations of initials and messages.

Mr. Korie chose Julius' as the setting for his song ''Kieran McHugh Remained Abroad,'' in which gay veterans of World War I who gathered at the bar during Prohibition describe their return from the battlefield.

Merrily played the marching bands

Welcoming home the straight.

Avenues teemed with patriots

Who now crusade for hate

Saturday nights at Julius'

Drinking to comrades lost --

Our hairy-chested widowhood

Gets sentimentally sauced

But the age of Julius', Mr. Korie said, ''doesn't jibe with the popular lore, that we were all closeted until 1969.''

Two other famous outposts of early gay society, the Life Cafeteria and a low-priced restaurant called Stewart's, faced each other across Sheridan Square. (The building once occupied by Stewart's, on Seventh Avenue South between Christopher and West Fourth Streets, now houses a General Nutrition Center.) Men with long hair, light makeup and stylized mannerisms used to meet behind the large plate-glass windows, observed like tropical fish by curious tourists.

It was an era in which the city abounded in rooming houses -- several in Manhattan, as well as the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, were rumored to be predominantly gay -- whose single tenants took their meals at inexpensive restaurants like these. Word soon spread about which cafeterias were tolerant of gays, at least at certain times of day.

''They worked on shifts,'' said Mr. Korie, referring to the late-night hours during which gays could safely gather at certain branches of Childs and Horn & Hardart, two major restaurant chains.

Horn & Hardart Automats were distinctive for dispensing food from little metal compartments. Their outposts were largely unsupervised, and thus attractive to gays.

In some cafeterias, owners tolerated only gays who did not draw attention to themselves. In others, customers were allowed to let their hair down. Notable for its permissiveness was the Childs on 59th Street near Columbus Circle, nicknamed ''Mother Childs'' because of its prime location on the gay compass, between Central Park and the theater district.

Another freewheeling Childs, at least in the wee hours, was in the Paramount Theater Building at Broadway and 43rd Street. Mr. Korie owns an illustration of a man decked out in what the lyricist imagines as the ''Childs look'': peroxided hair, a brightly colored tie and a little lip rouge. In a narrative that is part of the Carnegie Hall program, a middle-aged character describes the Childs crowd:

''At midnight, when I am in bed with a book, they 'drop hairpins' and 'camp' on the tabletops at Childs Restaurant in Times Square. I go only to order pancakes. I must lose weight.''

Harlem Takes the Drag Ball To New Heights

In the 1920's, a daring new form of masquerade party was becoming popular in Greenwich Village, Midtown Manhattan and the area near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But the most spectacular and celebrated of these events, a resplendent annual drag ball, was held in Harlem.

''These made Wigstock look like an Off Off Broadway show,'' said Mr. Korie, as he headed north by cab in search of 280 West 155th Street, the former site of the Rockland Palace, where the Hamilton Lodge of the Odd Fellows fraternal society held annual drag balls in the 1920's and 30's. At their height in the late 30's, the balls drew 8,000 dancers and onlookers, blacks from Harlem and whites from throughout the city.

The site is now a parking lot beneath an overpass leading to the Macombs Dam Bridge. A sign advertises parking for Yankee Stadium, just across the Harlem River. Mr. Korie inspected the asphalt for vestiges of the past. ''There are no tiaras lying around,'' he reported.

''This must have been a glamorous location, near the river,'' he added. In the gospel-tinged number ''Sister Hallie Lujah,'' he imagines the grand entrances made at these events:

Sister Hallie Lujah

You're quite the nun tonight

There in your sequined wimple

You've got that 'inner light'

Another Harlem landmark in the history of gay New York is the Salem United Methodist Church. Now 97 years old, the brick building with a magnificent arched front window still stands at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 129th Street. It was there, in 1928, that the poet Countee Cullen entered into a brief marriage with Yolanda Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois. (Cullen then went on a honeymoon with the best man.) Cullen, like several members of the Harlem Renaissance, felt compelled to hide his sexual identity.

Well Before Bette Midler, The Baths Were the Place to Be

Mr. Korie's tour reached its coda as he stopped for a bite at the Broadway Diner at the southeast corner of 55th Street and Broadway. The building, mostly occupied by a Best Western Hotel, has no gay historical significance, but its lost twin, the Ariston apartment hotel just to the north, has a rich past. Its basement housed the Ariston Baths, which served an all-gay clientele in the early 20th century. As described in the song ''Lunch at the Turkish Baths,'' this gathering place was a key stop:

My dining club isn't Ivy League,

Although it's exclusively male.

A haven of health and athletics

Devoted to manly aesthetics

Since one has to lunch,

I lunch with the bunch

Who lunch at the Turkish Baths

Commuters contentedly doze off.

A number I know with their clothes off.

How many men hide a nature belied

At lunch at the Turkish Baths?

Pleasantly passes the working day

Rested of body and brain.

Stopping to pick up a rose bouquet,

I race for the Westchester train.

A chap on the opposite aisle

Exchanges a sad little smile

Averting our eyes we assume our disguise

With our newspapers raised in denial

Over a salad at the diner, Mr. Korie recalled that his interest in New York's gay past intensified while he was writing ''Harvey Milk'' (with the composer Stewart Wallace) and interviewed Scott Smith, one of Milk's lovers, who died of AIDS in 1995. Mr. Smith told Mr. Korie that in the 50's, when Milk was a teenager living in Woodmere, N.Y., he had been arrested for cruising in the Ramble in Central Park. In Mr. Korie's eyes, ordinary gay people, as well as martyrs like Milk, are worthy of attention.

''When I walk the streets here,'' Mr. Korie said, ''I feel that history, that those who came before me, engaged in the same issues that are still important to me today. There's hope for an answer here, and that's what entices other disenfranchised people, not just gays, to come to New York.

''It's in the air, even if the buildings aren't there anymore. That's why I'll always live in New York.''

READING LIST

Out And About

IN reseaching ''A Gay Songbook,'' Michael Korie consulted several books on gay life in New York. Here are some of the major titles.

''About Time: Exploring the Gay Past,'' by Martin Duberman.

''Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in 20th Century America,'' by Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman.

''Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia,'' by Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson.

''The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America Since World War II,'' by Charles Kaiser.

''Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940,'' by George Chauncey.

''Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,'' edited by George Chauncey, Martin Duberman and Martha Vicinus.

''Out for Good: the Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America,'' by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney.

''Stepping Out: Nine Walks Through New York City's Gay and Lesbian Past,'' by Daniel Hurewitz.

''Stonewall,'' by Martin Duberman.

''Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's,'' by Ann Douglas.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 14, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Journey to an Overlooked Past. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe